


Disarray

by GrumpiestCat



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 14:44:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7938538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrumpiestCat/pseuds/GrumpiestCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her only possible allies were her fellow victims.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disarray

The briefest of glances, exchanged in the hallway. One girl on the way to the lab, the other heading back to the dorm.  
  
(Prison.)  
  
River hadn't initiated it. She kept her cards close to her chest (no, no, no, no cards; weren't allowed to play with toys), never contacted another soul without doing reconnaissance first. Who was this person? Who was he, who was she? Would he turn her in, do her allegiances lie with the enemy? Someone here had to be safe (statistically speaking, it was possible, in theory), and as soon as she found that person, there were things that had to be done.   
  
Simon obviously hadn't gotten any of her letters. Not the ones sent at first, blatant and loud; this isn't what I thought, GET ME OUT OF HERE. Not the ones sent after, with riddles and codes, carefully designed sequence that no one here would see but he should have been able to discover. And not the latest ones, jumbles of nonsense, no code to be seen, but enough to alert him to the fact that she's not herself anymore.   
  
Nobody was coming for her.   
  
So she would have to manufacture her own escape. It would have been easy enough if it weren't for the random, floating psychosis and the guards and the guns and the locks on the doors and the ID scans at the elevators. Her first attempt had failed, but she was lucky in that she managed to flee before the guards found out who had tampered with the air ducts.  
  
Her only possible allies were her fellow victims. She scanned them from time to time, gathering information. It was difficult; she hadn't mastered the art of focusing on just one person ("You will, soon," they promise her), and any attempt to read someone's mind was polluted with bits of things from others. The guard by the door is cheating on his wife with one of the lab techs. The doctor in the third room is contemplating leaving her husband and moving to Osiris. The intern who just passed has a boring life, a boring mind. He was just trying to make sure the cups of medicine don't spill.   
  
But she doesn't reach out, doesn't make contact. So when the thought popped into her mind -   
  
  
_hi, there_   
  
  
\- it almost made her trip over her feet. She barely had time to turn her head, get a better glimpse of this brave new stranger.   
  
  
-  
  
  
"I saw you."  
  
A voice, this time. River didn't look up from her peas, didn't stop squishing them one by one. The girl sat down next to her, too close, elbows touching hers. Her tray bore only carrots, little mushy circles arranged in a perfect star shape.   
  
"These things happen," River replied. "People passing in hallways, both having eyes, eyes that function, light that enters, impulses that are transmitted to the brain, translated, I see you too. One day, I will know how to alter my body so it doesn't absorb light rays, and then I will be invisible. Blind, too, though, that's the problem. I'll bump into walls. It's a matter of physics."  
  
"My name's Liana. It's from the Latin, means 'to bind'. It's also the name of an old tropical climbing plant. I think it's a stupid name. My sister's name is Lihua, which means 'pear blossom'. It's prettier than mine. I hate her, but she is not here."  
  
"What's your designation?"  
  
"PBH-008. You?"  
  
"My name is River."  
  
"River. An English word meaning 'a large natural stream of water which empties into an ocean, lake, or other body of water and which is usually fed along its course by converging tributaries'. Related idioms: 'sell down the river' - to betray someone's trust; 'up the river' - to go to lockdown. And what's your designation?"  
  
"PBH-021. It's not a prime number. Too many factors, too big, too odd, it's ugly."  
  
"Ah." Liana picked up two pieces of carrot and pressed them together. "Oh-twenty-one, you must be new."  
  
"Been here a while."  
  
"Yes, but I've been here longer."  
  
"I am sure that your parents weep with pride every night," River said sourly. She was running out of peas and growing agitated. They all had to be smashed, every single one of them.   
  
"I thought you might be oh-twenty-one. They talk a lot about oh-twenty-one. Think a lot about oh-twenty-one. I've heard lots of things about oh-twenty-one."  
  
"Twenty-one, an old game from Earth-that-was, hit, stay, bust, don't get too many, or we shoot you. Get blood all over the cards, hard to shuffle. Buy new deck, Mother will get mad. Doesn't like spending money unless it's on expensive clothes."  
  
Liana took one of her carrot pieces and slid it over until it was touching the rim of River's plate. "They think you're better than I am. I wouldn't believe them, but I'm good, I could tell if they were thinking fake thoughts to make me think fake things. They do that, sometimes. Fill you up with nonsense."  
  
"The point to this conversation must have driven over a cliff. It was drinking, too much, too much, too much drinking, lose coordination, reflexes, crash, boom."  
  
"Maybe I just wanted a new friend. Or a friend, period, as I don't have any right now. We should have lunch together tomorrow. We could take our trays into that little alcove on this floor, just past the nurses' station. I do that a lot. Nobody cares, just as long as you clean up your mess. Don't bleed on the carpet, don't feed the fish, the monkeys will get mad. Fling their feces."   
  
And as quickly as she had sat down, she was gone. River peered out of the corner of her eye, watching her put away her tray in the reclamation system. She started to reach out with her mind, offer a simple thought to agree, to confirm her reservation, but her paranoia took over - it's a trap of some sort what are you doing they're on to you the whole thing has to be a trick it was so weird like a scene from a bad book it has to be a trick she's going to eat your brains they know you've been trying to escape and so what have you done, River? - and she stood up with a start, arms flailing, trying to grab back the thought before it got to its destination.  
  
"Don't start, oh-twenty-one."  
  
When she only got more upset, the guard put a hand on her shoulder and roughly shoved her down.   
  
"These numbers are stupid! These numbers are used to _dehumanize_ us and - "  
  
"I don't care. Now come on, it's time for your treatment."  
  
Normally, she would have been upset or worried about her treatment, but as it was, she was busy trying to remember how many peas she squished, so that she could add them to her monthly total.   
  
It was important to keep track of such things. At one point, she had been up to six million, four hundred and thirty-two thousand, nine hundred and eighty-one. She had hoped that Simon would take her away from her pea-squishing opportunities, but that no longer seemed like an option.   
  
\-   
  
Later: "You hate it here. Really."  
  
They should have been questions, River supposed, but Liana had an annoying tendency to speak in flat tones, declaring everything as if she knew all the bits to be known in the world, and there were never any ambiguity or equivocation.   
  
"I hate it here more than any other place in the 'verse," River said as she picked at loose threads on the couch.  
  
"Have you been to every other place in the 'verse?"  
  
"My mind has been. And after careful consideration and analysis and scientific study, oh-twenty-one has concluded that this place is worse than all other places in the 'verse. The standard deviation says it all. You can lie with statistics and to statistics, but the statistics themselves always bear the truth. Worst place ever, write it down, publish it on the Cortex, verified by me, can't sue for slander, always right, at least on Tuesdays."  
  
Liana leaned back in her chair, balancing perfectly on only two of the legs. "Your premise is flawed."  
  
"Your _brain_ is flawed."  
  
"The world is flawed."  
  
"The world is exactly as it should be," River shot back. "It's your conception of the world which is at fault."  
  
"My conception was planned."  
  
"Then your parents were flawed. Are flawed. Will be flawed. Will ever are be flawed."  
  
"And the Tams, I'm sure, were the most perfect people ever to have graced the surface of Osiris."  
  
There was a crash from somewhere above. Shrill screaming - no, no, no, stop, no, no, stop. River looked up, locked in on the mind of the one making all the noise, but she couldn't stay there for long.   
  
"She did it wrong," Liana murmured. "Couldn't follow the gorram directions."  
  
"Or just didn't want to."  
  
"We don't all hate it here, River."  
  
"You would if you were as smart as you think you are. Our lives are red and blue and smashed peas and I see them; all the peas turn red."  
  
"It's better than where I was. They're making us into better people."  
  
River scratched the scab on her arm until it bled. She smeared the blood on her finger and drew shapes on the tile. Parallelogram, rhombus, pentagram, hexagram.   
  
"I don't want to be a better person."  
  
She yelped when Liana stopped balancing on her chair and wiped away her bloody shapes with the bottom of her foot.  
  
"You're leaving me," she said, her normally flat voice tinged with anger and surprise.  
  
"Perhaps." River began to pick the scab on her other arm. "Maybe they dig too deep, push too hard, rip out the wrong thing, I go away forever. At least I won't be here."  
  
When there was no response, she glanced up from her drawings, but Liana was gone.   
  
If she had allowed her mind to wander out, to survey the minds beyond the the alcove, the cafeteria, the hallway, the building, the perimeter fence, if she had sought out the thoughts of the people in the ship hovering just at the edge of sensor range, she might have found her brother, his mind cluttered as he nervously put on the uniform he had paid an insane amount of money for.

 

(fin.)


End file.
